“30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates” including the French philosopher Bernard Henri Levy, the British writers Salman Rushdie and Ian MacEwan, the Czech born writer Milan Kundera and the historian Simon Shama have written to leading European newspapers warning that “the idea of Europe is coming apart before our eyes” “We must now “will Europe” or perish beneath the waves of populism.”
Of course they blame what they call “populism” and “nationalism” by the ignorant masses who have suffered decades of mass unemployment, social degradation and mass migrations, sacrificed their parliaments and constitutions on the altar of the European Union and ignored their intellectual superiors to take to the streets and the ballot box to overturn the catastrophic ideas of these euro-elites. They say it is a
“disgrace for those who still believe in the legacy of Erasmus, Dante, Goethe, and Comenius; disdain for intelligence and culture; explosions of xenophobia and antisemitism; disaster”.
All these figures lived before the existence of Italy, Germany or Belgium as nation states. None of them saw the three catastrophic attempts to create a European superstate of the 20th century and Goethe for one had ideas inimical to such hegemonies.
GOETHE
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was a genius and polymath, scientist, philosopher and playwright. He believed in classical liberal free trade between nations and cultural exchange as a means of enhancing the welfare of nations. He was against the centralisation of government. He was even suspicious of the idea of the big German State, never mind a European Superstate!
“One is mistaken, however, if one thinks that Germany’s unity should be expressed in the form of one large capital city, and that this great city might benefit the masses in the same way that it might benefit the development of a few outstanding individuals,”
“Frankfurt, Bremen, Hamburg, Luebeck are large and brilliant, and their impact on the prosperity of Germany is incalculable. Yet, would they remain what they are if they were to lose their independence and be incorporated as provincial cities into one great German Empire?”
How much more would he have condemned the alienating European superstate with its abolition of constitutions, parliaments, peoples (through mass migrations) and democracies. All the great figures of German music and literature and philosophy – Goethe, Schiller, Brahms, Bach, Beethoven, Nietzsche, Kant, Marx and Hegel spent all or virtually all their lives free of the German State which was not founded until 1871. But all of them would know the suffering brought by the Napoleonic hegemony, that first attempt to create a technocratic centralised “United Europe”.
These “intellectuals” go on to claim for their “idea of Europe” (ie the European Union) that this catastrophic enterprise uniquely created motherhood and apply pie:
“Without the idea of Europe, freedom, women’s rights, democracy, egalitarianism is hard to defend in my part of the world.”
But of course the power of the people against Kings was established in 1215 in the nation state of England. The welfare state was developed in Germany and Britain, parliamentary democracy in the USA and Britain, egalitarianism in revolutionary France, freedoms for the people in the centuries old common law in England. Women’s voting rights were established first in New Zealand in 1893!
What we have from their European Superstate (idea) is such economic destitution, democratic powerlessness, elitist dictatorship of corporatists and intellectuals that democracy has been forced to take to the streets.
SUPRANATIONALISM THE DISEASE, NATIONISM THE CURE
All the characteristics of disintegration, social collapse, hatreds and illiberalism which these “30 writers, historians and Nobel laureates” identify with “nationalism” and “populism” have arisen out of the nation and parliament-destroying European Superstate which they support. It is we democratic nationists, seeking to re-establish the sovereignty of the people within those historical nation states small enough to sustain parliamentary democracies, who have exposed these evils.
It is the Euro-State which these intellectuals praise which has reproduced the shape, structure and corporatist fascism of the 1930s and 1940s where supranational bureaucracy has power over voters and big business frustrates the consumer. Corporatism exploits the mass migrations of European youth to find work, Jews are targeted and are fleeing Europe in record numbers and there are riotous protests of powerless voters in all European capitals.
How reminiscent of communists and Nazis demonstrating in the Weimar Republic are the yellow vests and red scarves of the protesting French!
It is only the use of electoral power by moderate nationist * opponents of this alienating European Superstate (as set out on this website for over 22 years) who are (just) preventing a return to the dangers of the past. For, just as Chancellor Bruening’s Weimar Government created the structures, corporate power and totalitarian law exploited by Hitler’s Nazi regime, so today the EU has destroyed all the liberal economic structures (both economic and electoral) which could prevent economic collapse and the resulting totalitarian takeover.
No wonder the British, with their individual strength of purpose and sense of democratic challenge to unaccountable power, are the first to leave this Shangri La for intellectuals, the European Union. As these intellectuals note they have been “abandoned from across the Channel” – but they evidently don’t understand why!
*Nationist – first coined in the 1994 book Treason at Maastricht, the destruction of the nation state and described on the Freenations home page and in this article: http://freenations.net/nationism-not-nationalism/
THE PAMPERED INTELLECTUAL
And we must not forget what pampered unaccountable and unelected figures these “intellectual leaders” are with their State guaranteed jobs, salaries and pensions – paid regardless of the cold winds of economic responsibility affecting everyone else.
Many of these signatories are of course multi millionaire writers but even to maintain a salary typical of the modern academic professor (£100,000) (although many will be earning far more in various foundations) would require capital of the order of £2.5m. No need to build this capital themselves by serving the populus, no need to seek votes from the people for their politics and privileges.
They and the political elites who “built this Europe” have lost all credibility. The real world constructs built on their “idea of Europe” have predictably turned to ashes.
